Discrete Mathematics

I believe that it would be helpful to have Discrete Mathematics in your arsenal. It will be great for college students that have a hard time with all the logic that goes into it. Thank you for taking the time to read my post.

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21 comments

I'm inclined to agree. In addition to Khan Academy, I spend some time taking courses from thegreatcourses.com, including one on discrete math by Arthur Benjamin. But courses there aren't free, and they aren't interactive, and you don't score any Khan Academy energy points for taking them.

There are new courses under development all the time at the academy, but resources are limited, and requests for new subjects are numerous.

I second the suggestion / request for Discrete Mathematics! Especially since Khan Academy is trying to encourage and grow people in programming and logic, (and with Discrete Mathematics being one of the major pillars / foundations of Computer Science), it would make an excellent addition and help to further grow students interested in Computer Science.

I agree so much about this. I will be taking a Duel Enrollment course for this in senior year (high school). I go on KA a lot to practice the math I am learning. I could keep up in the class and maybe even try to get ahead of the other students. Also it could help the KA users who intend to go into majoring in Computer Science

After having been a hobbyist programmer for several year, going back to school and taking up computer science officially, and after 5 years of study off and on, taking a course Discrete Mathematics ( including Boolean Algebra ) did three things for me.

Changed the way I think about logic

Changed the way I write software

Raised my level of literacy when researching various topics in the literature.

Boolean Algebra is fundamentally important to computer science. A curriculum or body of learning resources in computer science ( as a science ) or in programming ( as a professional skill ) without Boolean Algebra is incomplete. :)

While Boolean Algebra is a formal system leading into Discrete Math, the entry point, the topic is so much richer: combinatorics, graph theory, generating functions.

I would love to see all of that!

School throws folks into the mix and asks them to make software by a deadline because that is what the industry wants, but without this kind of foundation, they are throwing them to the wolves.

I have an AA in Computer Science, if such a title means anything at all. :( The course I took was in the Information Technology curriculum, which is geared toward IT management. The choice of that course being required for IT, but not for an kind of CS makes zero sense.

I strongly second this request. As an undergraduate of Computer Science, I can say this is the topic that I find very interesting and hard to learn at the same time. I would highly appreciate if there was the Khan Academy course explaining this in the same intuitive manner as the other ones do.

I agree. I have a Computer Science degree and this was an important class for building foundation skills that I use in my career as a programmer. It was a class that many people had trouble with and a Khan Academy style of learning for this topic could help many.

Discrete Mathematics is a term that is often used for those mathematical subjects which are utterly essential to computer science, but which computer scientists needn’t dive too deeply into.

But Khan Academy doesn’t cover this in its core mathematics, which culminates in the harder (IMO) calculus subjects, it must be admitted. It follows the classical arithmetic->algebra+geometry->trigonometry->calculus path, with digressions primarily for younger learnes (how to graph, basic stuff like that).

Anyway, the reason is that once you have either learned calculus and everything that comes before it, or struggled with calculus a bit but understood what came before it, the basics of discrete mathematics are quite easy. Some of it will be known from probability (again, available on Khan) such as combinations and permutations.

To rephrase: Discrete Mathematics can either refer to a certain subsection of undergraduate mathematics courses (those that aren’t continuous) or a single course for getting everybody up to speed with what they need (that isn’t continuous) for engineers and computer scientists, as Danah said. But in these, graph theory will be covered in only a few weeks, with independent reading/exercises expected from the students. And undergraduates are not the Khan Academy’s target.

Jefferson - Unfortunately, Khan Academy’s trigonometry course is maybe half complete and has remained in this state since 2015. We’re approaching 5 years of virtually no activity in finishing the course.